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The High Priestess: Janna Blair

This post contains spoilers for my Persona-H campaign, so if you’re one of my players, LOOK AWAY, BOY!!!!

Anyway. Now that THAT’s out of the way…

The High Priestess

Shy, smart, and intensely loyal to her companions, Janna Blair is a classic Priestess character for the Persona series. Cishetero, she/her, brown haired and green eyed, she’s a high school freshman (14-15), putting her one year behind most of the team, but she’s more academically gifted than almost any of them. They first encounter her in Geometry, the math class most students take the year after Algebra (which most students take as freshmen), and she’s clearly bored in that class. To explain her academic ability, she studies Trigonometry over the summer and skips straight to Calculus as a sophomore. Janna is also a gifted gymnast and athlete, though her extreme introversion keeps her from bragging about her talents.

Janna Blair, artist unknown (?)

As impressive as she is, Janna has grown up in the shadow of her older brother, Brent, who is not only academically gifted (though his talents are more modest than hers), but he has something she lacks: popularity. Janna has long since given up on being as cool or as loved as her brother, and it seems like nothing she does can ever live up to him or their parents’ perceived expectations.

She is, like many Persona High Priestess characters, trapped in a passive role through circumstances beyond her control. She believes in knowledge and wisdom and protects. She is an intuitive, patient, thoughtful person, and in Tarot terms represents the anima, or the feminine ideal energy. In a way, Janna is the most default archetypal female character in the game. (Which is not to be sexist. That’s just what the High Priestess card is typically saying.)

And if you know me, you know I am putting in tricks to invert the trope and your expectations!

Janna isn’t great with people, especially boys, whom she finds annoyingly attractive but impossible to understand or attract. She doesn’t expect anyone to notice her, ever. Through a series of coincidences, she claims a near total stranger (Wayne Iori, one of the player characters) as her boyfriend in order to stave off the unwelcome advances of some upperclassmen hitting on her, and when that actually works, she is astonished. Her dubious brother insists the two accompany him and his girlfriend Claire on a date, which ends up being the whole group going to a hockey game. Wayne goes through with the deception, and Janna is surprised when she actually has a decent time and wants to see Wayne again. It is this event that unlocks her metaverse, Seattle Underground.

Awakening and Persona

Forced out of her shell a bit, Janna subconsciously welcomes the Heroes to her own world, where she is an underdog archeologist and scholar trying (and failing) to recover buried secrets that will make her world famous. Her rival in this reality is the Shadow version of her brother Brent, an albino reflection of the man who seeks the secrets of the underground world for his own greed and advancement. He always seems to be a step ahead of her, and is constantly injuring her, sometimes apparently mortally.

When Janna accepts her desire to revel in the action—when she comes to understand that she craves the rush as much as the knowledge gained from her adventures—Janna is able to take a (literal) leap of faith and finally awaken her Persona, Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Self-determined, powerful, and confident in her ability to rise to any occasion. But also prioritizing wisdom and knowledge as a means of understanding her enemies, rather than simply opposing them.

Janna is unique amongst the Heroes of the campaign in that she doesn’t use a gun. Instead, her weapons are, in keeping with her Persona, a climbing axe that can also be turned into a bow. (The bow deals “gun” damage, the way every other character has a melee attack that deals Physical damage and a ranged attack that deals Gun damage.)

Shadow and Fear

Janna’s fear to be overcome over the course of the game is the fear of being overshadowed and not being good enough. She has had to grow up in the shadow of her older, brilliant, charismatic brother Brent, who she sees subconsciously as oppressing her (hence her Awakening, see above). On her own, she has to come to see her value to her friends and her value as a person even if she isn’t perfect.

When Janna’s shadow takes charge of her physical self, she becomes dismissive, cruel, and, well, basically a mean-girl. She dresses provocatively, shows up fashionably late to her classes, and replies to overtures with insults, rather than her usual shyness. Rather infamously, she once dismissed Uki’s concern about her with “later slut!” and then just walked away. Her shadow self believes disdain and dislike is still better than indifference—no press is bad press—and by the time the heroes awaken her back to her true self, her reputation at the school is in tatters. Fortunately, this event transpires shortly before summer break, giving her a chance to reinvent herself in the fall.

Social Link

Janna is first and foremost an academic and a clear thinker, so her primary role in the group tends to be studying support and tutoring. Once unlocked, she is one of the most efficient routes to studying (including her in a study session boosts the Knowledge points gained), and time spent with her on a social link scene tends to net a character some Knowledge points. Her overall story arc as a social link involves trying to graduate from high school at the end of her sophomore year, failing to get early admission into the schools she wants to go to, and realizing the value in taking her time to nurture friendships and grow up before she pushes herself forward. Depending on player actions, she either stays to finish out high school or goes to study overseas in Japan to broaden her horizons.

Easter Eggs

The name “Janna Blair,” her initials being “J. B.” or “B. J.” is not accidental. For those familiar with the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck (and other variants, including the deck used in both Persona 3 and Persona 4), you’ll note that the High Priestess (or Papess) card contains the letters B and J for Boaz and Jachin, the black and white pillars of the entrance to Solomon’s temple in ancient Israel. In Persona 5, the letters don’t actually appear on the oddly stylized card, but that games Priestess character (Makoto Nijima) wears the letters B.J. literally embroidered on her collar, so that whenever they cut to her speaking, you can see them in her character portrait.